working lunchhttp://ourworkinglunch.com
Coaching and consulting for ambitious startupsMon, 31 Jul 2017 11:07:30 +0000en-UShourly1https://wordpress.org/?v=4.8.1123236522Passive income – 5 considerations before you take the plunge on your own internet businesshttp://ourworkinglunch.com/2017/04/20/passive-income-5-considerations-before-you-take-the-plunge-on-your-own-internet-business/
Thu, 20 Apr 2017 00:06:10 +0000http://ourworkinglunch.com/?p=3564

6 Minute read

Passive income is a catchphrase with mass appeal. Set it up and watch the money roll in. Sign me up!

So why are so few people embracing this? What are the chances of success and profit? Is it right for me?

In this post I explore 5 considerations, a starting point if you are considering taking the plunge.

The basics of passive income generation:

Passive income refers to an investment that automatically creates value without a real-time presence. Look at Pat Flynn’s great site for the best overview I have found (he made 1.8 million through passive income businesses in the last 12 months).

The first thing you will learn is that it’s not passive, you will have to invest a lot of time or money up front, and often maintain it.

Examples: an online business, ebook, or online course. Real estate and financial products like RRSP’s, stocks, and mutual funds are also passive income streams, but I argue they are fundamentally different than making your own business. You are buying a pre-packaged asset rather than building one.

5 Considerations

Can you shift to an entrepreneurial mindset?

At first, passive income doesn’t feel natural to most people. We are accustomed to instant gratification and rely on others to make our business for us. That’s right, most of us are perfectly happy to have others tell us what to do and make them money through a job.Then, when we invest this money, we want others to tell us the best place to put it (I’m one of these people). In other words, in our business there are always middle men between how we create value and how we get money for it. But building a passive income business is not for sheep.

It’s about thinking of yourself as a business.

It’s about delayed gratification and initiative. To take chances with no guarantees. It’s about designing assets, rather than buying a pre-packaged asset. With this in mind, you should cut out as many middle men as possible while maintaining an autonomous income stream. Aim to build something with greater returns than your average 5% stock market return. Consider examples of how others have built passive income businesses as archetypes for inspiration, and customize these models till they suit your goals, skills and passions.

Should you align your passions to the business?

For most this is a no-brainer, with passion comes the drive to make things a success and the authenticity people value. Yet there is something to be said for investing without the cloud of emotion to bias your decision-making. You could invest as a silent partner in a business you know nothing about, or buy real estate in a foreign country. A transaction. Here I would argue that you need to look back at question 1 – are you just buying what another middleman is offering? What is your added value?

Without passion, it cannot be a unique business – only an investment.

For e.g., even if you are highly skilled in a particular area, without passion you will not have the drive to create something radically new or the energy to create something with real positive impact. That seems like a waste of an opportunity to me. You are going to have to put time and energy into building the business anyway, why not make it something unique and shines your light onto the world?

Can you muster the energy to do the things you won’t like?

Even if you align the business with your passions, you will still have to do things you don’t like to realize your business. Often for creatives this means setting up the administrative things, or for business types this means designing the tangible experience. Here is a link to some creative templates and here is a link on ideas to help the administrative things. Regardless, you have to invest your energy, as well as time or money.

Be clear with yourself how much energy you are willing to invest, and automate energy drains.

Research beforehand to be realistic about what you are getting into, nothing feels worse than not getting the opportunity to either fail or succeed because you didn’t launch.

What kind of return can you expect for your effort?

I did a bit of research and came up with the following illustrative table showing effort to get typical passive income businesses onto the market, plotted against their reported returns. Of course this chart is highly subjective and just a rough guide! Naturally you need to account for how ‘passive’ you want it to be, your particular skill set, your passions, synergy with current investments, and on what schedule you want your returns to deliver. It’s probably the fastest and reliable way to become a millionaire without selling your cousin’s house.

The best opportunities are perhaps combinations of different tactics, yet to be brought to the mainstream.

An example I like of this is how you can bring together a product review blog and use amazon as an affiliate to serve as your own ecommerce platform, giving you kickbacks for every product sold but without the hassle of setting up your own ecommerce platform. Here’s more detail on that idea from a guy named Richard. His site has inspiration on 43 types of passive investments.

The chances for success

Here is a similar chart showing the average success plotted against the anticipated return. Bear in mind if everyone is swarming to a business type, e-courses for example, you can expect that space to heat up quickly.

The biggest insight for me is that synergy between your portfolio online businesses is the biggest contributor to your success.

For e.g., leveraging your subscriber list to market your e-course to, and then your product review site etc. Currently, youtube videos and advertising seems a decent way to break into a passive income, if you are willing to put your face in front of the camera and explain your unbiased review of a product or service. Unfortunately, you might have to ‘plan’ to have your cat jump at you in the middle of it to bump your ratings.

Passive incomes are a great way to get into entrepreneurship as they have a fixed period where you invest your time, money and energy. They are also a great opportunity to make your positive impact on the world. In sum, if you are looking to build your own passive income business, I would start with being aware of the shift in mindset it will require and to be weary for taking the easy route by just dumping your money with someone else’s investment. I hope you can conclude that anything worth doing is always more sustainable for you in the long run if you are passionate for it, and that you can step into it knowing your chances for success, return and impact on your energy.

11 min read

I did it! I’ve coached 20 entrepreneurs in 7 cities in 4 months.

My mission was to give a boost to radically new, positive impact business during my 6 month sabbatical. In exchange for lunch I offered up my expertise, and met some talented and passionate people throughout the world. I coached and consulted freelancers, digital nomads, first time entrepreneurs and seasoned veterans, duos and teams of 100. We covered everything from leadership challenges and personal development to business development, branding, design and proposition development. It’s been an awesome ride.

Here’s what I learned:

Being an entrepreneur in S.E. Asia means eating with chopsticks

Several entrepreneurs spoke of the inescapable need to forge links with locals.

There is tons of opportunity, but you can’t forego local connections. Locals bridge the language gap, enable business/land ownership in some countries, facilitate hellish bureaucracy, and provide a network to employees and new business. It requires lots of trust too. Local business partners can walk away with your business or be there for the long haul. In some cultures it’s OK to ‘steal’ from the workplace, in others you won’t ever hear dissent or see proactive thinking. Yet the middle class is exploding and opportunities abound, so learn how to use your chopsticks.

Business doesn’t have to be a dirty word

Positive karma = positive business. While I don’t actually believe in karma, on the road people consistently applauded my model to exchange lunch for coaching/consulting.

The fact is that the best business is always a reciprocal virtuous circle. People react better to a story that is about meaningful mutual gain, rather than a story of exploitation or financial transaction. Business with positive impact starts from a mindset of building value for others, which makes others intrinsically motivated to be a part of your business. For e.g., look at the success of Tom’s shoes model of buy 1 give 1 to the needy, which all but eliminated the need for a marketing budget. Consider alternative forms of marketing and business models to build in positive impacts for an audience wider than yourself, and enjoy the positive boomerang effect it creates.

Design is a coaching tool

Each session I had was a challenge in aligning the values and goals of the entrepreneurs with their business. Design methods made this process easy and practical.

Design is about creating compelling futures in products and services, and making them tangible through prototypes and storytelling. But you can create future versions of yourself! Design your life. Explore your own intuition through alternatives and feeling your way through it with prototypes. Make these alternatives concrete to help get out of your head! Try on that new suit, heck try on a few until you feel like you should. I believe a good design facilitator has the tools that naturally apply to coaching, tools that uncover deeper meaning, help make your future-self tangible, and helps you creatively explore all your personal potential.

The passive-income energy trap

Passive doesn’t exist. Many freelancers and entrepreneurs felt the need to diversify with a ‘passive income’ stream through books, property investment, or e-courses. In each session we rediscovered that these businesses not only take time to create and maintain, but almost always require you to do things you don’t like.

If you are looking to diversify your income stream, be clear with yourself about what level of energy you are willing to invest. Seek ways to automate or delegate energy drains.

Design is a tool for creating business portfolios

A veteran entrepreneur needed to judge the viability, feasibility and desirability of a range of new business ideas in relation to his existing businesses. Using design techniques we walked through 3 ideas, considered alternative business models and propositions, analyzed customer needs and insights, and designed in synergies with his existing businesses. In 1.5 hours we determined the strongest idea and key assumptions to test.

Hopefully you know that design is fundamental to lean startup (think protoyping and customer empathy tools, more can be found here), but have considered how you can use design to build a portfolio of businesses? Serial entrepreneurs or conglomerates can leverage existing product lines or services by building businesses with inherent synergies. For e.g., Alphabet owns Uber and Waymo (self driving car BU) this is no accident!

A clear vision can alleviate the need to micro-manage

Entrepreneurs often confessed to being seduced by the need to control everything, which strangled growth. One entrepreneur described how she couldn’t scale because she was spending hours on content, and delegating meant trusting others to do a good job. Clearly defining the vision helped reprioritize her time and enabled her to step away from content to build the business.

Defining a vision enables sacrifice. It gives you permission to delegate, expedite or automate tasks that sacrifice some quality because the net reward is higher. Instead of doing it yourself, coach others to do what you are already good at – which lets you do what you want to become good at. More about how to roadmap your way to a vision in this post.

Scaling through traction and engagement, which starts with you

One entrepreneur needed programmers – which meant engaging those in his network to become committed to his cause. Another needed to prove traction to get funding, and another needed more consistent clients – both of which meant building out from friends to a second and then third degree network.

The world is getting busier and louder. It’s hard to be heard. Increasingly there is the need to create small communities that are loyal and build your business from the ground up. That means your personal network is key. For some this may mean big and loose, for others powerful and tight-knit.

Time management: big picture to small picture

What next? Where to start? Nearly all the entrepreneurs I spoke to grapple with maximizing their time. Each coaching session always went from big picture to small, giving perspective and priority – and more confident and relaxed entrepreneurs!

Some simple rules of thumb can help day to day prioritization, like using the 80/20 rule. When you know what 20% of actions really contribute to your goals then you can start with those, but every once and a while you need to recalibrate your big picture to make sure you are effective (check out this post on how to multiply your time). Zoom from big-picture targets to bite-size actions.

A ‘net positive mindset’ and avoiding burnout

One entrepreneur was on the edge of a burnout for 3 years. He knew himself well, he knew what he needed to solve yet was drowning in it nonetheless. So we built him a personal plan that remedied the source of his unhealthy stress in his role, daily activities, and mindset.

Panic seems to stem from being overwhelmed with things that give you no energy. Part of building a positive business for the world is building one that is positive for yourself. If you can bring balance to your life you can bring balance to systems greater than yourself. Build a business where you become a little bit healthier every day. You should strive to be net positive. If you find yourself down the road swamped by all the things you don’t thrive on, you must restructure the rules of engagement in your business until you can build-in what gives you energy – and eliminate, automate or delegate what doesn’t. Check out this blog post for more.

Confidence

Many entrepreneurs I met chose alternative education and career paths. The result is that sooner or later they question their skills in relation to industry standards or how to reposition themselves in a better (yet believable) way. What helped was defining a compelling vision of the self and defining a new story and action plan to transcend insecurities and start the self-prophesizing reality.

Nobody should let today’s insecurities hold themselves back. Design your dream, fake it till you make it and leverage what you are already good at to get momentum going. More in this post on how to learn anything.

Decision-making is an overlooked competence

Two co-founders found themselves constantly rethinking decisions. We built a decision-making checklist and process that aligned with their responsibilities and personal dynamic.

Startups don’t have the operational basis of a regular business with protocols for reporting and decision making. With a simple protocol in place you can make higher quality decisions, move forward with confidence, and distill learnings. You can more effectively use your time by planning work that leads up to your next decision moment (think Minimum Viable Product process)

Minimum Viable Products (MVP) are too often focused on a product

An industry veteran of 30 years was setting out to build a service, yet struggling to find the confidence to invest 500K of her own money to build the app. Rather than jumping to a semi-functional product we refocused her efforts into testing assumptions in a step-by-step process.

Building confidence to invest time or money into the next step of a business is a process of checking assumptions and building proof, not about defining what level of final product you need to test.

Envision future versions to pivot with agility

When assessing a business idea, entrepreneurs always benefited from thinking in future versions of the business. In one case the conclusion was creating a high cash-flow version first, which would then pay for enough employees to start the service-intensive versio

Envisioning the future versions builds strategy into your launch and makes it easier to pivot through MVP testing and after launch. More on how to do this in this blog post.

The 3 musketeers: Meaning, Impact & Authenticity

A reoccurring theme in the sessions was the desire for these three. These aspects seemed a given in any discussion I had. As an aside, while I think these motivations hold true for positive impact businesses, I don’t think they hold true for those seeking to make a quick buck.

Daniel Pink argued that motivation is determined mastery of a skill, autonomy in tasks, and aligning purpose with that of the company. This seems true of employees but not entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs are more externally oriented. They desire to use their business to create meaning in society, are energized by seeing their impact, and make choices based on authentic alignment with their personal values. For employees urged to be more entrepreneurial in their work, designing meaning at work will become increasingly important (check out this post for how).

The power of coaching lies in giving yourself permission to be self-critical

Those who got the most out of our Working Lunches where those that gave themselves permission to be vulnerable and reflect critically about themselves.

Coaching injects new thinking into old behaviours, offering other external perspectives. As individuals we have difficulty truly being objective and self-critical – even coaches need coaching! Making this permission to be self-critical explicit as part of the coaching relationship helps frame the discussion and make it effective.

Leadership as a founder’s trap

Entrepreneurs are natural visionaries but are not necessarily leaders. I found many had a clear vision on the future but were daunted by persuading others to join their cause. Leadership challenges often emerged as a great limitation to their ability to scale and grow their business.

Entrepreneurs busy beavering away on their business may forget to do any personal development. Yet new business is about change, and leadership is about helping people grapple with change. Essential to growing your business is growing as a leader. Set targets to develop your personal style of leadership (and enjoy the benefits of ownership by investing in your primary employee).

Introverts may struggle to build a personal brand

Many founders and freelancers wanted to avoid the limelight, but struggled with how to build a brand and notoriety.

Not everyone has the charm of Tony Robbins, or the expertise. My thoughts are to find other ways to tell your story. Daft Punk are two faceless icons, Prince became ‘Symbol’. Make your introverted-ness a story in itself. Or make the brand focused on the unique format or USP, even if it is just you behind the work. The point is that people need strong associations to build the brand on – if it’s not your charm or expertise, then it needs to be something else that is just as compelling. There are options if you look for them, here’s a blog post about storytelling your way to a new brand positioning.

The new workplace is temporary

I visited a number of co-working spaces on my journey and heard mixed reviews from those that work there.

Co-working spaces have only begun to disrupt how we work. You start to see the advantages when you add to temporary workspaces concepts like flex hours and remote working for teams. Corporations will be drawn to them because they do not have all the expertise and creativity in-house. Future co-working spaces will focus on intense collaborations, focused on a particular product or competence. The power lies in bringing together fresh perspectives and passionate people in bespoke contexts that boost social interactivity and bonding. Workers are happier and the quality of work improves. Check out this post for more.

Expertise is not a substitute for boldness

People were surprised by the idea of Working Lunch, they said the story was clear and bold. This boldness made it easy to find people to coach. The story of Working Lunch was far more compelling than my CV.

Do you have what it takes to be an entrepreneur?

An entrepreneur takes action rather than writes long blog posts. Nah.. just kidding. But I don’t think there is a recipe, just be yourself and persevere. 20 Insights is 19 too many for an entrepreneur anyways…:)

P.s. If you know of a leader looking to build a business with a positive impact, and who could use a boost, I would love to see if I can help. Please forward my website http://ourworkinglunch.com/. Currently I’m in Vancouver, Canada.

]]>http://ourworkinglunch.com/2017/04/07/20-lunches-20-insights/feed/03534Let’s get personal: how Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) can transform learning and development at corporateshttp://ourworkinglunch.com/2017/03/25/please-get-personal-moocs-on-the-job-learning-at-corporates/
Sat, 25 Mar 2017 02:39:44 +0000http://ourworkinglunch.com/?p=3513

3 MINUTE READ

Want high quality/low cost training for your firm? MOOCs may have the answer, but they are no quick fix.

Hailed as the next revolution in education, Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are set to democratize access to learning, but the model still misses the personal touch needed to succeed in corporations.

In 2016, 58 million students will have taken an MOOC, and probably paid 1/100th what they would have at a local University for a certificate. Corporates are also keen on MOOCs to reduce training costs, build capabilities and engage their workforce. But adoption rates amongst corporates are low (~8%) One reason is the format doesn’t match the highly social and interactive work context. Learning management skills is about developing soft skills, not just acquiring knowledge. Corporate courses that abandon personalized training methods and leave students to ‘go it alone’ are doomed to fail.

The office as a classroom

Imagine if employees could do their sales course or management training from the sofa. Sounds idyllic? It would be pointless. Statistically they would be more likely to tune into the TV after 30 min and forget all about it by morning. Conversely taking out 3 hours of their busy week to sit through a physical class with colleagues would cause scheduling conflicts, loss of productivity, and involve costly trainers. The sweet spot is down the middle. Cherry-picking the best of both worlds will make trainings more effective for students and less costly for employers.

MOOCs for business – some statistics:

79% of learning & Development professionals see it as a cost effective way to deliver trainings to a broader spectrum of staff

Custom designed MOOCs that are made public are expected to attract talent and build brand awareness

About 45% of employees with degrees are keen to advance themselves with on-the-job training, rather than go back to school

HR professionals would like to see more MOOCs focus offerings on the workplace context, with shorter courses, and a focus on leadership issues says a Future Workplace

Low appeal for SME’s – seen as expensive if investment in training per employee is <1000$

The concept of a ‘MOOC’ doesn’t fit the average corporate’s need for personalized learning:

Open Internal network: learning is accelerated through social interaction, but company’s prefer to keep content discussions on an internal network so as to safeguard IP sensitive information and entice talent acquisition.

MOOCs can complement a strong team leader, coach, and trainer. MOOCs can do this by offering self-guided learning, discussion rooms for multiple perspectives on content, standardized content to align with certifications, and gamification of results to keep motivation high. Personalization of the content to the organizational and individual goals makes it deeply relevant to on-the-job challenges. Structured online content and forums would be great support to learning soft skills in high-context situations. Imagine leaders closing learning feedback loops in real time – with both coaches and online learning materials. Learning tools that consider emotions and actions in real situations. Tools with both theoretical structure and coaching support. So what needs to change is the format. MOOCs need tools to integrate with existing (human) training networks. Vice versa, human networks can benefit from technologies which structure content and facilitate social interaction beyond 1 on 1 training. And while we are at it, make the courses fit into a work day. Integrate learning with daily work, one day at a time.

The office as ultimate learning environment

If you are considering using MOOCs to train staff, or already are, consider the increased effectiveness of integrating them with personalized training tools. The office is already a classroom, maybe if we tweak MOOCs format employees can skip University all together?

3 minute read

Coworking is in danger of becoming mainstream.

Their numbers have grown dramatically every year since 2006 – in 2017 more than 1 million people will work in one. But their business model won’t scale and profits are low. Worst, their mainstream appeal may threaten their success.

Pieter Levels gives a bleak analysis of their business model – coworking spaces have low margins and don’t scale. Only 40% are profitable. He suggests looking at big pocketed corporates wanting to do remote work and get into the ‘free thinking’ vibe. These corporates would send teams to remotely build products and services in coworking spaces, and pay top dollar for it. But I doubt that this will work – it goes against the magic potion that makes coworking so effective. I don’t believe that just because a team of stiff corporates trade in their leather shoes for flip-flops and sunburns that they are going to transcend their old thought patterns and ways of working. Only immersion into a new culture can do that.

The strength of the nerd community makes coworking great.

‘The future of work is social’ Steve Munroe tells me at Hubud, Bali’s first coworking space. As co-founder of one of the premiere coworking spaces worldwide, he emphasizes that Hubud does more than 430 community events in 365 days. Their strength is their community. It appears to me (after visiting 6 coworking spaces in as many countries but never having lived or spent significant time in one) that the real secret is how intensely members of these communities interact. They want to have access to interesting people with unique perspectives. Nerds. It’s people getting together and nerding-out about their life’s passions and being willing to share without expectation of reciprocal gain. They share because they want to. It’s hedonistic. They are indulging in each other’s insightful perspective for the pleasure of it – and the coworking space merely facilitates this with stimulating environments and activities.

‘You are the average of the 5 people you most associate with’

Tim Ferriss

How to scale coworking? I would argue that the key is to accentuate their advantage. Compared to traditional work environments or working at home, coworking is like hitting a holistic refresh button. You can hit the beach in between focused work sessions and bump into entrepreneurs thinking about the next, next thing. A good community finds creative ways to help people nerd-out and get fresh angles on radically new ideas – in business and other aspects of life. But do coworking spaces take this far enough?

The turnover in coworking spaces is increasing and loyalty is decreasing. This reflects that nomads are indeed nomadic – they need new stimulus and clearly most coworking spaces are still falling short. Consistent WiFi, a desk, and beach access isn’t enough. Stopgap solutions are for the coworking spaces to create niche communities such as hubs for writers or designers. Simultaneously they can co-locate a mix of business types to exchange thinking. But what they really need is a systematic way to balance access to fresh thinking and effective work hours. Think peer to peer learning, synergized interest groups and flexible integration with corporate life. Yes even corporates can benefit by sending individuals/small teams on short sabbaticals or flex hours (but these corporate nomads can’t dominate the coworking culture).

The key to scale is to offer immersion in communities of fresh thinking to a wider target group, with deeper pockets, at more dispersed intervals. Perhaps KLM’s idea to allow you to chose who you sit next to on a flight is a good analogy, if you (or your company) can design who your spend time with – then you can design relevant fresh thinking and effectiveness into your work!

The future of work is social, and you can design it.

So indulge yourself. The future of coworking is about connected communities with tools for stimulation and renewal. Coworking spaces should lean on their advantage of bringing together communities with radically new perspectives. I dare to argue that they should design programs and orchestrate communities they expect will enjoy synergy. Knowing how to create bespoke work environments and communities will be their competitive advantage. But be weary, if coworking spaces attract a mainstream mindset and culture they will lose their potency.

Millennials are in search of meaning at work.

Gallup says 71% of millennial workers world-wide don’t feel engaged at work. A massive 51% are looking for new opportunities.

I think design can help millennial workers make meaning in their work.

Many people don’t recognize parts of themselves in their work. Some don’t see their place in the company as important, or feel they are working on ‘someone else’s dream’. Or that their boss isn’t looking out for them, or that they are but a cog in the corporate system. Even entrepreneurs who are working on their dream business feel the dilution of purpose as a business grows. The point is that almost inevitably, we will all suffer a crisis of meaning at work – but I think there is a way out of the crisis for most people. In this article I want to offer a perspective from design that can help you do something about your crisis of meaning at work.

First – What is meaning?

Meaning is deep satisfaction. It’s better than chocolate cake. It means satisfying your higher-order needs and gives you motivation towards a goal. A nice reference is Daniel Pink’s great Ted talk: motivation at work is:

Autonomy – self direction

Mastery – improvement at core skills

Purpose – aligning personal needs and a cause beyond oneself to daily work

The question is how to practically do this in my job?

First the right mindset. Satisfied colleagues I know own their situation. They feel responsible for their personal satisfaction at work. Accept that you must self direct, define your core skills to improve in. Most important to achieving meaning at work is taking responsibility to seek alignment between your personal needs and the goals of the company – or a cause beyond it. Most juniors have a hard time with this, they expect the employer to create the conditions for them to excel. A few good employers do, but this doesn’t, and cannot compensate for the effect of a personal sense of ownership to create your own meaningful work.

Putting the right mindset into action:

Simply make it so that you are working on your dream at work. Get involved with the vision of the company. Design a win-win situation for your company and you. The goal isn’t to shift the company, rather to carve out a niche for yourself that helps both the company and you grow at the same time. Be an entrepreneur within your company. This is hard in some professions or markets. Law, finance, data entry – the ‘dry’ stuff. Yet even here I dare argue that through the right mindset and creative negotiation of your circumstances you should be able to create meaning in your work.

The secret is to design your meaningful situation.

I want to introduce the idea that you can design a meaningful work experience using a process that designers use to embed meaning into brand and product experiences. It works because the process embeds meaning into what you do. Strategist Nathan Shedroff describes how brands and products appeal to a universal set of meanings which people value (achievement, beauty, community, etc.), regardless of whether the product is drinks or software. Brands focus on one meaning to embody, for example Coca Cola is about happiness, Harley Davidson is about rebellion. Shedroff has a model which details how to innovate meaningful experiences for end consumers. Now let’s use this model to help us build meaningful careers! Below I make a simplified approach for designing your meaningful work situation:

How to design meaning into your work:

The mindset of ownership. Accept that you are responsible for creating your own meaningful work environment. Accept that you are in need of a change; don’t complain – act. Define what you are willing to do to make a change and gather your energy – it’s not easy.

Know yourself. What higher order values and meanings are dear to you? What gives you energy and excites you? Gives you purpose? Here is a list for inspiration.

Identify the opportunity. Look globally first – how do your needs for meaning relate to society’s needs (e.g. your need for equality makes you passionate about the issue of food shortages)? How does your company/startup represent meaning in society, how does this relate to your personal needs and ambitions (e.g. experience the joy of creation making better packaging that preserves food)? What activities can/do you do that connect to your personal values and quest for meaning (autonomy/mastery/purpose)? Are there KPIs that align with your skills? What activities are a no-go? Identify the opportunity for meaning in a succinct story you can explain to others. Be sure to align value for you, the company and society.

Frame your idea. Describe what actions/functions/roles you will do and which you will stop. Talk to your managers, CEO or team and share your vision for how your contribution creates meaning for you, the company and society. Keep it simple and not preachy. The point is to share your ambition and get energy going into your work from other people and so they know what their contribution can be to make you more effective. If you have managers, they need to recognize the benefit of an engaged worker, so sell it well. Turn it into a project.

Shape and refine your work experience. Put your plan into action. This will be hard at first, you need to break old habits of yourself and co-workers that reflect the old situation. Look at all the aspects of your job. Once you have an awesome day, analyze it to see why and how you can do more of this work and phase out the unhelpful aspects. Continually build on this to keep shaping your own meaningful experience at work.

Taking control of finding meaning at work can take enormous amounts of effort. Most difficult perhaps is when you are only half happy. Here I would make a clear argument – it’s not going to get better on its own. And if you make a concerted effort and your progress towards a meaningful job is clearly blocked by an uncooperative boss or lacklustre CEO, quit. I accept that not everyone has the luxury of doing this, but most often people in the developed world have this choice. It’s about priorities, and again, owning it. Staying in an unchangeable situation will slowly erode your energy, but prepare yourself carefully for the difficult journey of rebuilding meaning at your next stop.

Working ‘for the man’ is yesterday’s work. All of us can benefit from this millennial thinking if we design meaning into our work.

P.s. This week one of the entrepreneurs I coach quit and left her day job to seek more meaning. This takes enormous courage and gives enormous energy at the same time. The day after she quit she was offered a training gig. Go get em tiger!

Every startup evolves – often unexpectedly. How do you manage this effectively?

How to transition from Free to Pay? How to take that thriving community and monetize it? How can you keep doors open to embrace all the potential but lock in what you need to move forward? And sometimes we just have an awesome business idea, something radically new. We don’t know how yet, but we feel it will work. In all these contexts, how to skillfully navigate this all the twists and turns so you can get to the best business? This article looks at one tool from design which can help improve your agility when you need to reconfigure your business.

It’s challenging to get to the ‘best business’

Transitioning your business or launching something radically new requires looking at different configurations of the business model and offering, and aligning them with emerging insights from validation rounds. This is fundamental stuff for startups – check out this lean startup process here, where Eric Ries captures a build/measure/learn approach to testing a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) and reconfiguring the idea until it is ready for launch. The point is to identify and test underlying hypotheses. Key to success is gracefully navigating these reconfigurations (pivots in startup jargon). If we are too slow, funding may run out or the competition will close in. If you ignore a key component then an idea may fail to reach its full potential or you will miss an underlying hypothesis. Simply put, you need a certain amount of agility and creativity to successfully go from one pivot to the next – and to get to that best business fast.

Agility and creativity are central to a graceful pivot.

Agility ensures you can leap quickly and flexibly from one configuration to the next. For e.g., if today’s testing shows that the B2B market is not big enough to make the business viable, you can quickly align your business to incorporate part of the consumer market tomorrow. Creativity helps you interpret and generate new solutions based on your insight – what the business will look like to appeal to this new consumer market. The more creative prowess, the stronger your resulting pivot can be.

Here’s the fun part. You can learn creativity and agility in your business domain.

By actively exploring alternative solutions you build your agility to respond to new insight. Simultaneously you learn to become creative with your business.

Your intuition will guide you to what creative solutions are best. At the beginning it’s only natural that this feels like a daunting task, even for seasoned designers. In radical innovation we have a hard time quickly jumping to the best configuration because we can’t rely on already proven business models or consumer insights. We have to feel our way to the best solution. Our intuition says we are onto something, and we will ‘know it when we see it’. That’s why we need to purposely create alternatives of the business model and offering, to make your intuition tangible. We explore extremes, because once we make it tangible we can shoot it down easily, and figure out how best to test it.

The trick – purposely create tangible alternatives.

The same goes for envisioning future versions of our business. For e.g., if we anticipate that we first have to build a thriving ‘free’ community, and then transition to a pay model – it helps to understand what this pay model could look like so as to be able to build into the free community key aspects like membership accounts and confidentiality terms. Sounds obvious but surprisingly few people I speak to actually go the distance and give shape to the 2nd, 3rd or 4th version of their business when caught up in the hustle of launching version 1. In a Working Lunch with a well funded big startup, they failed to consider the entirety of what it would mean to appeal to an end-consumer target group as a pivot from their B2B target group. Their brand was unappealing and functional, and in the haste to get to market they thought that the consumer brand piece of the puzzle would sort itself out as they launched. Having not considered this dimension in any version of their business, I imagine they will be slow to pivot.

In summary, transitioning to future versions of our business is less daunting when we have explored how different configurations would look and how we can test for them. creating tangible alternatives makes you flex your creative muscles specifically focused on the subject matter. This increases your agility to respond to results of validation testing. This makes your testing smarter and more focused. This makes your offering better.

How:

Align on the key criteria of your offering, do this with your team. What are the critical/unique aspects which have not yet been tested. For e.g., Pricing model, market share etc.

Generate creative alternatives. Conceptually, and tangibly where possible, make versions of your business model and offering that are distinctly addressing your key criteria in a different way. Also consider future versions of your business. One tool for conceptually generating multiple business model canvases could be the Canvanizer. Start with ‘What if’ questions and purposely seek extremes. For e.g., switch your target group to see how a new pricing model/market share could be improved.

Test the alternatives against each other. The goal is learning and generating new insights, not necessarily to reach the final form of your offering. Again, follow the ‘learn, build, measure’ technique. For e.g., comparing two sets of pricing models in informal interviews with different target groups.

Capture your insight. Clearly stating what you have learned is something few people do, but essential to making an effective pivot. Once you’ve stated it clearly, project this onto the versions you have created.

Gracefully pivot as needed. This may mean quickly terminating options that don’t work (which is easier now because you have envisioned other configurations!) and reprioritize easily to another configuration that aligns with emerging insight.

P.s. In design we are taught to never fall in love with our first idea. We have to push until we reach an essence. In radical innovation it is the same. Only by winning the lottery will you get the idea right the first time. Think of Edison and the commercial light bulb – 3000 versions. Dyson and the bagless vacuum – 1000 prototypes. Similarly we must create versions of our business – what is it for your launching customer, for early adopters tomorrow, for the early majority in a year from now?

The real power of this tool is how it scales. Big companies like Alphabet can build roadmaps from these envisioned future for how their businesses have synergy with each other and help each other grow. Imagine, you can plot out complimentary services, or key transitions in technology and consumer beliefs so that you build agility and creativity in a given domain. For e.g., radical innovations like self-driving cars and the Uber platform have an inherent synergy when you happen to have deep domain knowledge in both. I think a great job would be envisioning futures based on the portfolio of a company like Google Ventures / GV, and helping them make decisions on which new companies to bring into the fold to maximize business potential.

I can appreciate the 80/20 rule, yet I think it’s outdated.

Sure, I accept that a first analysis will often show that 20% of inputs lead to 80% of outputs. I also agree that you can use this to sharpen your focus. But this analysis isn’t a catchall for every situation, and therefore hard to consistently put it into action on a daily basis. Most importantly it misses an opportunity for making really good use of your time – the potential to do things that multiply their effect over time.

How to use time today so that it multiplies its effect in the future?

Unarguably you need to start by doing the right things. It’s common thinking that the 80/20 rule helps determine these – for e.g. that since a small percentage (20%) of your clients x,y, and z make up 80% of your business revenue, focusing (80% of) your sales effort on this group is doing the right thing. You can use the Pareto principle (the 80/20 rule) to break down many things in this way, determining what critical things need to happen to achieve 80% of the effect. But I think there is a limit to this thinking.

The 80/20 rule stops working as a practical tool for prioritization when we have competing goals. If I spent 80% of my day only doing things for sales acquisition focused on my top 3 customers, when do I have time to manage my team? And I feel like most top performers already have a good feeling for what critical actions need to happen each day. Finally if we just followed the 80/20 rule, we ignore the potential power of the 20%. We can use this 20% to move beyond just doing the right things, to things that will multiply in the future.

A better tool than 80/20

First, here is a more practical tool than the 80/20 rule. Rory Vaden introduces this in a TedX video and much more thoroughly in his book. Simply filter all tasks like this:

How:

Can I Eliminate it? Many things really aren’t essential upon reflection.

Can I Automate it? By investing a small amount of time now, you can save time in the future.

Can I Delegate it? Some tasks don’t need your personal attention or level of perfection, you can teach someone else to do it.

If you can’t do 1-3, then ask yourself, do I need to do it now or can it wait until later?

What I like about this approach is that it is much more practical and leaves you to manage competing goals dynamically. You can run through this list a few moments a day, and it works.

The crux is that we must recognize that a decision to do something is also a decision to not do something else. And while we say ‘no’ all the time, we must carefully say ‘yes’ to only the right things. What Rory correctly identifies is that we need to give ourselves emotional permission to make these decisions to say ‘no’ easier:

Eliminate — the permission to ignore (and not waste time beating yourself up over it)

Automate — the permission to invest (setting up something now to save time tomorrow)

Delegate — the permission of imperfect (don’t do it yourself)

Procrastinate — the permission of incomplete (it’s OK to not have all the loose ends tied up)

Concentrate — the permission to protect (your thinking time and focus)

The most powerful thing Rory touches upon is the concept of multiplying your time. He proposes that instead of just prioritizing based on importance and urgency, you also consider significance – which considers how long something is important. The great thing about this is you begin to consider the wider context of why you are doing things – and their impact on higher level goals. And sadly, this is where he doesn’t take the idea far enough. His argument is that you multiply time by eliminating, automating, or delegating – but this really is just a more effective way of saving time.

Stop saving time, seek tasks that multiply their effect over time.

As young investors we are taught the power of compounding interest. I believe the same is true for our use of time. We really multiply the impact of our time when we make an investment today to make an increasingly large return tomorrow. How do you set things in action that grow themselves? It’s not about impact in one instance, but sustained and compounding impact. Let’s assume some common high-level goals are things like love, finance, health, corporate growth – the question becomes how can we take a few actions, maybe with only 5% of our time, that will give exponentially large returns in the future? Consider things like setting up a passive income, taking a second honeymoon, taking a sabbatical that unites your family, or a corporate retreat that binds all your team through a unique experience? You won’t think about these with just the 80/20 rule or with Rory’s checklist – but I think this is how you can really multiply your time.

Multiplying with others

And to go even further, consider how can your actions multiply the effect of others’ contributions. How can we align a group or team so that their actions compound the effect of each other’s actions, a true synergy? For inspiration on this check out Liz Wiseman’s book ‘multipliers’. She talks about 5 kinds of leaders:

The mindset of seeking tasks that multiply their effect or that of others over time is essential. It will help to unlock big wins in the future with comparably small actions today. That’s making good use of your time! To be clear, I’m skeptical that all actions can be multipliers… only sometimes can you make the timing work. It’s like a scrabble board, if you keep your eye out for the 2x or 3x time score, then you can make sure you grab these opportunities. Be mindful that without planning they never happen. The key is that you plan and execute a multiplier every so often – and then reap the rewards far beyond just 80/20!

Is leadership the starting point for new business? If so, then what does leadership look like starting from zero, from a blank slate?

In a recent working lunch in Vietnam, I was consulting 10 disabled artists seeking to start a new business as a collective. But they lacked a starting point. How to start their business? What to do first? How would the pieces come together? Collectively they had a rough vision for what the business should be, but no plan to put it into action. They were paralyzed.

For me, the question was how could I help them? I was leaving Vietnam in 2 weeks, I wouldn’t be around to see things through. I knew they had to own it. I had tools to help them create a total picture: which customer needs to focus on, which roles they needed in their team, and which steps to take first. This helped crystallize the vision and plan, but did that matter? They needed to mobilize — to put the plan into action.

The first task was to define a leader within their group. Without it they couldn’t own their initiative. Outside the group, there were plenty of supporting volunteers willing to help. I met a few times with these volunteers, amassing enthusiasm and names of people willing to support different pieces of the puzzle like branding, co-ordinating supply of materials, photography, etc. The group of artists were fueled by the attention. It occurred to me that the most valuable thing we volunteers had done is to give them energy, to engage them to put their plan into action.

Energy builds momentum, momentum builds energy.

In leading them to their new business, we started with giving them energy so they could rise up and lead themselves. Leadership is like a cascading stockpile of energy, this is really what we mean by empowerment.

When we approach a new business or engage a team in a new initiative, we often ignore the effect of energy. Often managers start with introducing practicalities, role responsibilities, changes in protocol. Employees are left to find it within themselves to interpret the change emotionally and gather the energy to embrace it. Similarly, bootstrapping and company building can take enormous amounts of energy to achieve the desired growth. It may seem that the most important thing is locking in an investor or setting KPIs, but this is not the starting point.

How will you ensure growth builds momentum?

I think it is a question of leadership. Leadership defines what is important, what should have attention, what matters. As leaders we do this by evoking energy where it is needed. We choose where to focus our own energy, plan which parts of the business need momentum, and how to maintain a net positive flow in our team. Like Seth Godin concludes, a fundamental skill is the ability to influence, ‘to persuade others to take action’. This is how we lead – some through charisma, persuasion, or a silent but resolute focus on what matters. At the start of a business initiative, energy fuels growth, leadership directs growth, and therefore, leadership starts with energy.

‘…you have to be able to be convincing. It’s not enough to be knowledgeable or experienced. If you can’t stand up and tell a story, and make people listen to you, then it’s of no use. You have to be believed as well. Be convincing, make a statement.’

Think you can’t change?

That you will never be creative? Or do public speaking? Or that leading a team is not your thing? You can. Without having met you I know that with the right approach, you can learn anything.

This article will recap how you can learn anything, and once you’ve accepted this is possible, I will follow it up with an article considering what this means for building an ambitious startup.

How:

Break it into chunks

Mirror the greats

Commit and repeat

Practice with true and immediate feedback

There is lots of research on how individuals can learn faster, more effectively, and systematically. I will try to summarize some highlights on how to learn, practically and physiologically:

Define what to learn, break it down into chunks

For example, your anxiety in public speaking might come from the moments before a presentation, triggering a ‘fight or flight’ reaction. Practically, define ways to overcome this specific part, or chunk, of public speaking anxiety. An example could be learning the controversialpower-pose, or practicing slow breathing before you go on stage to counter the feeling of anxiety (alternatively you can practice your speeches in a lion cage).

Physiologically, learning can be improved by ‘chunking’ information into smaller bits, enabling complex sequences of parts to be broken up into smaller bits that are easier to store and retrieve in memory. A simple example shows how you can more easily remember the number 12101946 by chunking it into 12, 10, and 1946.

Mirror the greats in multiple ways

Learning from an expert allows you to mirror the best habits and tactics. Finding different ways to watch, experience, and study experts builds a repertoire of techniques to learn something. Practically this can mean duplicating speech patterns (and speeches) of great speakers to improve your flow and lower your anxiety.

Physiologically we engage types of mirror neurons which unconsciously help speed up our learning. Specifically it is the act of physically reproducing the technique you are learning which is most effective, rather than just passively observing.

Commit and repeat

Planning your emotional commitment is key, it comes down to willpower and planning. If you can commit to a plan to make ‘errors’ and systematically ‘fail’ for a period long enough to acquire a skill, then you can overcome the emotional hurdle of learning something new. Repetition is essential to habit forming and skill acquisition, so make a practical plan to find dedicated time without distraction to focus on learning a subset chunk of your skill. Most of all, accept in yourself that you are a great public speaker (in the making), this self-perpetuating perception of self is a powerful tool.

‘It’s all about their perception of self. At some point very early on they (great musicians) had a crystallizing experience that brings the idea to the fore, that says, I am a musician. That idea is like a snowball rolling downhill.’

Some current theories are that practically you will need at least 20 hours to establish a skill (fun TedEd talk by Kaufman), and maybe 10,000 hours if you want intuitive expertise (Malcolm Gladwell, ‘Outliers’), but the reality is not that simple. Practically it matters what type of skill you are learning. To keep it simple, skills which have clear rules and cause-effect relationships are easier to learn and take less time (such as learning to speak at volume levels that others can hear clearly), v.s. skills with no clear rules (such as ad-lib humour that others actually find funny). So if you want to learn to speak loud and clear, this is a lot easier than learning to being funny. I think the science here is best captured by Daniel Kahneman and Klein on establishing intuitive expertise in relation to the learning context. Good news is that regardless of the type of skill, physiologically there is evidence that physically repeating new behaviour coats neurons in myelin, which helps neurons fire faster and perpetuates this behaviour. It’s why you never forget how to ride a bike. The same goes for your bad habits, they die hard because the myelin makes it easy to fire those neurons.

True & immediate feedback

Practically you need to find learning conditions that give you real and immediate feedback, if not you are learning false cause-effect relationships. Imagine presenting to your grandma, she’s going to hang off your every word! This will teach you that your bad jokes are funny. So practice in real circumstances that amplify your anxiety to present, and receive feedback on the skills you are practicing. Only then will you establish true intuitive connections with your progress. A coach can also help on the spot – the best coaches of top athletes have been found to focus on small corrections in the moment, not on pep-talks or theoretical feedback.

Physiologically we develop intuition by learning cause-effect relationships, encoding this unconsciously. In The Talent Code, Daniel Coyle describes a study of a winning UCLA basketball coach’s effective technique to focus on small corrections and in the moment adjustments for immediate feedback.

While there are many fun articles about learning faster which I find not entirely grounded in science, initial research I discuss above makes some compelling arguments – you can learn anything with the right approach. Sure, some things you will learn faster than others, using adjacent or complementary skills. More than this, the way we have learned to learn is embedded in our education systems and values, which has fallen out of sync with the fast expanding possibilities and multi-dimensional lives of today. As business leaders seek talent and how to train co-workers for the future, and individuals seek to manage multiple phases of careers in our lives – learning to learn effectively is now a key question.

‘Learning how to learn is life’s most important skill.’

Tony Buzan

Once we accept that we can learn anything, what potential will this new mindset unlock? Next week in part 2 (here it is) I will consider the implications in relation to entrepreneurship and leadership. Subscribe so you don’t miss it!